Replace ‘shiplu’ with your username to mach an error for your own. I have .htaccess file in public_html folder. I was wondering why apache was looking for it inside my home directory?

Then I discovered that I have 700 mode on my home directory (/home/shiplu). So apache maps the path /extjs to /home/shiplu/public_html/extjs and look for .htaccess file on every folder in the path way. While looking for /home/.htaccess it found the file doesn’t exists. In the next step while reading /home/shiplu/.htaccess, it couldn’t even determine files existence due to lack of permission.

The easy solve was to give read access to my home directory. But I want to give read access only to apache. Not to anything else. So I add apache in my group and give my group users to read access it. Why my group? because home directory of a user is usually owned by the users own group and the user himself.